Aris Poulianos, (born on July 24, 1924 in Ikaria, Greece) is a Greek anthropologist. He studied biology at Queen's College in New York City in 1948. He studied anthropology in Moscow and earned his Ph.D in 1961. He worked at the Soviet Academy of Sciences until 1965, when he returned to Greece. He conducted research about the anthropological origins of Balkan peoples and European populations in general. During this time, he led research expeditions in Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, former Yugoslavia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. After he returned to Greece, Poulianos continued conducting anthropological research (i.e. populations in Spain; the Ainu of Japan). His research was concerned with the origins of the inhabitants of the Haemus Peninsula, as well as on the origins of Europeans in general. Poulianos' best-known project was the study of the Petralona Cave in Chalcidice, a site where prehistoric human remains had been found accidentally by Philippos Chatzaridis on May 10, 1959. Poulianos also studied the excavations that occurred in the Triglia site in Chalkidiki and the prehistoric elephant site at Perdikkas-Ptolemais.

In 1969, Aris Poulianos was elected Vice-President of the 8th International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in Tokyo. In 1971, Poulianos founded the Anthropological Association of Greece, which is now run by his son. This organization, specifically, has had a long-standing dispute with the Greek Ministry of Culture, after the latter's attempts to evict the Anthropological Association of Greece from the excavation site in the Petralona Cave, which was conceded to them after a 1981 contract. In 1976, Poulianos founded the Department of Paleoanthropology-Spelaeology, which functions within the Greek Ministry of Culture. He is a permanent member of the International Council of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization). In 1979, he was appointed President of the 3rd European Congress of Anthropology at Prague, which held its works in 1982 at Petralona.

Aris Poulianos is a controversial figure with more support in the nationalistic circles of Greece than in the scientific community. Among his claims are the existence of a "12,000,000 million years old homo erectus trigliensis" on Greek soil, as well as other claims that are radically at odds with the commonly accepted chronology of human development. Aris Poulianos has published five books and numerous articles, many of them in the yearbook "Anthropos" which is published by his own association.

Archanthropus of Petralona

Poulianos claims that the first proof of native intelligent human presence in Europe was to be found with the discovery of the Archanthropus skull in Chalcidice, Greece in 1960. The skull has been dated to be at least 700,000 years old by two German scientists, anthropologist E. Breitinger and palaeontologist O. Sickenberg. Poulianos has claimed that this discovery renders the Indo-European theory obsolete.